Muppet Question # 1 Answered

Here's a comment timt left on my very first post:


TimT said...

Kermit and Miss Piggy got married, right?

Well, were there any legal or constitutional issues they had to work through in order to have their cross-species relationship recognised?


The answer, of course, is complicated. I say that partially to try and explain the fact that it has taken me a full 23 days to come up with an answer (I have been on holidays, bedridden with a terrible illness, and - of course - busy researching the topic in that time), and partially because it makes me sound so-much-more learned than the rest of you.

This is all bunk, however, as before we establish an answer to this question, we must first investigate the question itself properly.




The truth is, Kermit and Miss Piggy were never lovey-dovey on The Muppet Show. Miss Piggy was always infatuated with Kermit, and showed a massive amount of anger and jealousy if he ever got close to one of the female guest stars (or they to him). But for the entire run of the show, they were not an item - not by any stretch of the imagination.

However, in the Muppet movies, Kermit began to return Miss Piggy's affections (purely for the sake of providing the films with a nice, convenient, romantic subplot, it could be argued), and to this end, Kermit (unwittingly) married Piggy in The Muppets Take Manhattan.

That being said, subsequent events suggest that it was only their characters in the movie that married, and that their relationship is really the same as it ever was.

In both Muppets From Space and It's A Very Merry Muppet Christmas, where the Muppets arguably play 'themselves' (as opposed to the classic characters they play in A Muppet Christmas Carol, Muppet Treasure Island, and the more recent Muppet Wizard Of Oz), it is clear that Kermit and Miss Piggy are not married and do not consider themselves to be spoken for.

I don't know if they got divorced, are happily separated, or if their marriage was some kind of scam played on the movie-going public of the 80s, but it's probably a good thing they didn't stay together and procreate. If they had, this would have been the unfortunate result:

A face not even a mother could love. Especially not Miss Piggy.

Which brings us back, with a creepy shudder up the spine, to timt's original question. I guess the point I want to make here is that in light of the above examination of the supposed 'fact' that Kermit and Miss Piggy married, it is in fact evident that they never did. Or perhaps they ran into the very troubles you were asking about in your question, timt.

Although it is true that anything goes, especially in America, it is perhaps pertinent to note that Kermit & Miss Piggy's wedding vows were originally made during the Reagan presidency.

Actually, I don't see the relevance of that at all ...

The point is, it is highly possible that after filming the scene where Kermit happily gave up fighting Miss Piggy's affections and married her, the pair was taken before the courts because of their unconstitutional inter-species marriage.

Bear in mind that this was years before gay marriages were permitted in the Proud state of Massachusetts, so a frog and a pig tying the knot would surely have been frowned upon, at the very least.

In fact, it is my opinion that Kermit only gave in and married Piggy because he knew the marriage bond would be broken by a court of law afterwards. It was a sure way to shut Miss Piggy up!

It's probably all for the best, anyway. If they were married, there would have been endless arguments about which of them was going to leapfrog ahead in their professional career so they could bring home the bacon.

*cue karate chop from Miss Piggy for such an obvious pun*